I have been thinking about this and there has been speculation and anecdotal evidence but the first evidence I found regarding voter turnout came in USATODAY where we are shown the truth of how many people came out to vote this election cycle. I am convinced that we all win in a democratic system whenever participation goes up. Hopefully we can find ways (better than we had this year) to raise voter turnout on a consistent basis.
There are plenty of reactions out there that are bitter, angry, spiteful or haughty across the political spectrum. Here is a good example of a reasonable approach to creating healing and unity by focusing on now rather than dwelling on a past that we cannot change whether or not we would want to.
I hope to see more and more of the unifying, forward-thinking types of reactions across the net and across the country as the election drifts slowly out of our rearview mirror.
I have thought for a long time about changes we could make to our political system and what they would mean in reality. I have a new one. I wonder what the effect would be if each state were required to elect one democrat and one republican as their senators? From a very short-sighted point of view it would make very little difference from our current senate split of 50-49-1. Any ideas about what it would really mean?
I have figured out the best reason to re-elect George Bush this year. I am under no pretense that everybody agrees with this idea, but I think few people have considered the unique opportunity that re-electing our current president provides for the American political system.
If George Bush is re-elected he will not leave any heir-apparent in the Republican party which would give moderate republicans four years to get to work in the effort of taking back their party from the extreme rightists that currently control it by the time that they have to hold a primary election to select their next presidential candidate – someone who is moderate rather than someone who is willing to talk moderate.
Before every presidential election the party that is not in control of the White House holds a presidential primary to choose their guy, but the party in powe rarely does that. If President Bush is re-elected both parties will be holding serious prmary elections – there will be no real incumbant in either party and moderates in both parties can make their voices heard so that we do not end up like this year without a good candidate on the ballot – that includes all the third party candidates.
One of the resons that I find it rather easy to write this before the election is because my vote is already cast based on geography. Because I live in Utah my vote will be counted for President Bush no matter who it is I would like to support. Perhaps I am trying to find a reason to support the vote that will inevitably be recorded for me in the electoral college.
I just had an interesting thought. I have been looking at our presidential candidates and what they have been saying and I just recognized a difference in the campaigns.
President Bush is running for the office of president of the United States. (Anyone reading that is going to say “Duh, what did you think he was running for?”) The interesting things is that I just realized that Senator Kerry is not running for the office of president of the United States (Now those same people are saying “I thought he was running for president of the United States, what do you think he is running for?”) he is running for the office of “Leader of the Free World.”
Is there a difference? Yes.
Which one should they be running for? That is for the voters to decide.
The DNC is busy making sure that Bush doesn’t win the debates on spin after the fact so they have made sure to send their followers to make their voice heard at the polls.
Online polling is unscientific at best no matter which man wins, but they’re making sure that there is no chance of balance when they make such a blatant effort to misrepresent public opinion by overloading the poll results with the votes of the democratic faithfull. It sure looks fishy when CBS News has Kerry winning by an 80% margin when all the other polls have margins of 9 to 40%. I guess the republicans don’t vote CBS.
Thanks to electoral-vote.com I discovered the efforts of Colorado Democrats who hope not to be disenfranchised in the presidential election this year as reported in the Rocky Mountain News at the beginning of August.
This is exactly in line with what I was advocating in response to the New York Times editorial about abolishing the electoral college. Right now there are too many states taken for granted in every election but if we put the vote of every elector in play to some degree we will have a much more democratic system as it was designed to be. I suggest that the voiceless Republicans in California and New York try to get similar measures on their ballots for November.
I thought this really shows the difference between “politics” and “issues” by highlighting some issues. I would add just one thing – if either candidate can give a simple answer to any of these issues I won’t believe him.
Thanks to David Anderson for bringing this to my attention on his blog.
When the New York Times publishes an editorial I always read carefully. I do not agree with some of their columnists, but I have never disagreed outright with the columns of their editorial board – until they said that we should Abolish the Electoral College. I fully agree that “the Electoral College makes Republicans in New York, and Democrats in Utah, superfluous. It also makes members of the majority party in those states feel less than crucial.” But I cannot agree that “The small states are already significantly overrepresented in the Senate.”
The apparent disparity built into the electoral college by the founding fathers was not an accident based on a desire to not have to count each individual vote nationally back when it was more difficult to count each vote. The fact is that even back then every state had to get a tally of each vote within the state to choose the electors and even today it would only take a couple of minutes with a paper and pencil to add the numbers certified by each of the fifty states.
Let’s think about the effect that abolishing the Electoral College would have on national campaigns to remind ourselves why it was invented in the first place. We have seventeen states in play during this election. Without the Electoral College a solid majority in the ten largest states would allow a person to get elected so long as they did not lose by large margins in the other forty states. Not only that but since the concerns of voters break more along regional lines than strictly along state lines the campaigning would actually take place in two or three regions that comprise a solid majority of voters. That is not any better than the current situation. It actually sounds like the situation with the South when Lincoln was elected in 1860. It would mean that we would always know which ten or fifteen states all the campaigning would take place in well ahead of time. If you live in one of those largest of states it makes perfect sense to call for the abolishment of the Electoral College where the politicians will pander to your wishes perpetually.
As for the smaller states being over-represented in the Senate, that fact is balanced by their underrepresentation in the house where agreement of the ten largest states can override the interests of the other forty states and all the other representatives in the House. These “smaller” states tend to be among the largest states with regard to land and resources for the nation. In these under-populated states the federal government often controls huge amounts of the land which means that they must have adequate representation lest their rights be trampled by states with higher populations and far different concerns.
It is presumptuous to say “it’s a ridiculous setup” without allowing the system to function as it was designed – which it does not do currently. We must eliminate block voting by all the states which, unlike the Electoral College, is not established by the US Constitution if we are to see how the Electoral College was meant to work. Until we have tried the more representative version of the Electoral College that the founding fathers envisioned we cannot accurately say that it is fundamentally flawed.
It would probably be useful for me to note here that Maine and Nebraska do not practice block voting. In Colorado the Democrats are trying to put a referrendum on the November ballot to stop block voting there as well. I know that in these states the votes corresponding to their representatives are divided proportional to the vote and the votes corresponding to their senators are blocked for whoever carries the state. That is one example of how to not vote as a block. I am sure that there are more options than how these two states do it or straight block voting.
It is possible that we could still find that the Electoral College does not work and that we need to change the system but we should try to fix the problem without altering the constitution before we jump into yet another ill-conceived constitutional amendment debate.
I know I’m a little late blogging about this because I have been at a conference this week, but . . .
I have been hearing this argument that Sadaam was not a threat to us because Sadaam and Al Qaeda were enemies. It just makes me sick that people can use such poor logic as the basis for their public arguments. Even if they have better reasons for opposing the war, they put forth the nice sound bite that proves nothing about whether Sadaam was a threat. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” has never been more obviously false. The fact that Sadaam and Al Qaeda were enemies does nothing to make either one of them a friend to the United States.